reminder

draft – to proceed: an exploration of games and learning

Abstract

In this paper I develop a methodology for thinking about the relationship between learning and gameplay that challenges popular rhetorical frameworks that situate games as either tools or texts. After making a game and discussing its limitations in this paper, I argue for a way of thinking about game design that centers the way designers construct literacies with which to network ideas together in context.

prompts

prompt

“Agency, then, goes beyond both participation and activity. As an aesthetic pleasure, as an experience to be savored for its own sake, it is offered to a limited degree in traditional art forms but is more commonly available in the structured activities we call games. Therefore, when we move narrative to the computer, we move it to a realm already shaped by the structures of games. Can we imagine a compelling narrative literature that builds on these game structures without being diminished by them? Or are we merely talking about an expensive way to rewire Hamlet for the pinball machine?” (382)

• Navigation 1: Story in the Maze
• Navigation 2: Rapture of the Rhizome
• Giving Shape to Anxiety: “Violence Hub”
• Journey Story & Problem Solving

Janet Murray says that games, “can be experienced as a symbolic drama.” (393) Can you take the elements of an existing story and turn it into a game? Use one or more of the techniques listed above to make a new version of “The Blue Umbrella” (http://vimeo.com/93015909) that gives the “interactor” agency in the construction of a narrative.

research notes: rust

for those not in the know:

Rust is an Early Access survival game on Steam, created by Facepunch Studios. We also make Garry’s Mod, which has sold over 5 million copies. Rust was inspired by games like DayZ, Minecraft and Stalker. It is a multiplayer game where you and other players are attempting to survive through the awful conditions, where humanity has been reduced to cavemen. Rust’s world is harsh. The environment is not kind. Bears and wolves will chase and kill you. Falling from a height will kill you. Being exposed to radiation for an extended period will kill you. Starving will kill you. Being cold will kill you. Other players can find you, kill you, and take your stuff. Fortunately for you, you can kill others and take their stuff. Or maybe you can make friends and help each other survive, using the game’s building tools to create a safe haven? We just make the tools, and allow the community to express themselves. They’ve made incredible things so far. (source)

day one

first ~15 minutes

*randomly chooses server with 0 players on it, advertised as no-mod/vanilla, noob-friendly*
spawn in total darkness, try to take inventory of items loaded in my hotbar: rock, bandages/health pack, torches
press 3 to start burning torches, walk to nearby cliff face, try to interface by clicking it, nothing happens
open settings menu, consult controls guide, close guide with no better understanding of what to do or how to do something
*sigh*
stumble around in the dark, jump on rocks, stumble across an area and begin to hear clicks of a geiger counter, search for source of sound, discover nothing, afk until daybreak.

Fuck this game.

conceptual skeleton

Foreclosing Possibility in Virtual Worlds:
An Exploration of Language, Space, and Bodies
in the Simulation of Gender and Minecraft

(link to pdf)

This thesis is a textual analysis and discourse analysis that examines the social and programmatic construction of the videogame Minecraft by interrogating how code, design, and fan modifications limit and facilitate play in and outside the game. This thesis will argue that the constitution of gender—and subjectivity, more broadly—is reflected in the language, space, and bodies that shape the boundaries of the virtual world. What makes a player “cyborgian” when they embody a virtual avatar may have less to do the abstraction of agency into a computerized self and more to do with the way in which humans create and maintain conduits to exist between worlds that are both digital and material.

#indiE3

“Games under Capitalism” – an #indiE3 presentation 

[Part 1 begins at 01:35:00] [ Part 2 ends at 00:33:00 ]

Warning: not to be read by someone expecting complete ideas or full sentences. Literally, this is just stuff I worked out of my head. It’s not entirely complete because I was also texting myself thoughts during the same time period, which I may transcribe at a later date.

reconciling the self as a limited form of expression

I am an expression of my own potentiality; within a milieu of energy, my potential is in constant flux, and so the limits of my expression are always changing.

trashbin

was going to just delete this paragraph of word vomit from the top of my thesis introduction, but something is compelling me to keep it. i present this word vomit as it has existed for the last several days; it is ephemera. fwiw, it would probably be better forgotten:

the danger in assuming that politics are benign: the virtual world becomes the preferred world because it allows for the cyborg body in a way that materializes the subjective self in a way that is not damaging to the environment. the cyborg is co-optable in a humanistic project that seeks to divorce the perceived self from the material world: transcendence. security is always bodily relational; how able is the body to resist change, a perceived process of (in part) erasure. 

Edit: the following are additions to the trashbin: